How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [3]
Mr. Williams also wrote to the governor … very submissively professing his intent … [and] offering his book, or any part of it, to be burnt.
In 1634 the governor noted:
Mr. Williams of Salem [has] broken his promise to us, in teaching publicly against the king’s patent, and our great sin in claiming right thereby to this country.
And the year after that:
The governor … sent for Mr. Williams. The occasion was, for that he had taught publicly that a magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man, for that we thereby have communion with a wicked man in the worship of God, and cause him to take the name of God in vain.
Williams was driving the governor crazy. He was also genuinely angering fellow ministers and others in the colony’s power structure. This time around, he was put on trial for advocating against the Church of England, against the colony’s religious laws, against the use of oaths in the name of God prior to giving testimony, and against England’s right to the land. In his defense, Williams stated, “I acknowledge the particulars were rightly summed up, and I also hope that … through the Lord’s assistance, I shall be ready … not only to be bound and banished, but to die also, in New England, as for most holy Truths of God in Christ Jesus.”5
He was convicted.
The court ordered Williams to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony within six weeks. Technically, he was banished for religious reasons. In reality, he was banished for secular reasons. His views undermined British authority. Here again, the events have frequently been told in a way that flips their religious/secular basis. In this instance, however, the story was given its secular spin not by post–Revolutionary War Americans but by the Puritan colonists as justification for his banishment.6 Ironically, among those same colonists were some who privately sympathized with Williams—including none other than Governor Winthrop himself. “When I was unkindly and unchristianly, as I believe, driven from my house and land,” William revealed some thirty-five years later, “Governor Mr. Winthrop privately wrote to me to steer my course toward Narragansett Bay.”7
Williams arranged with the local Indians to build a homestead on a plot of land on Narragansett Bay’s northeastern edge. But, as he soon learned from another private friend, this location had a boundary problem. Massachusetts, at that time, comprised the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Plymouth Colony, and the governor of the Plymouth Colony informed him that he would have to leave there, too. That governor also turned out to be a secret sympathizer. “I received a letter from my ancient friend, Mr. Winslow, then governor of Plymouth,” Williams later recollected, “advising me, since I was fallen into the edge of their bounds, and they were loath to displease the Bay, to remove but to the other side of the water and there, he said, I had the country free before me.”
Williams consequently relocated to the bay’s western edge, where, to accommodate the arrival of his followers, he arranged with the Narragansetts for a larger area upon which to settle. Because the land he was accorded resulted from acts of kindness by native peoples and colonial governors—all ostensibly enemies—Williams accorded it a special name: Providence.
During the time that Williams was arranging to relocate outside the boundaries of the Plymouth Colony, another group of exiles arrived from Massachusetts. Anne Hutchinson had been banished after Williams, in her case for religious beliefs that undermined the power of ministers (as opposed to Williams’s beliefs, which undermined the power of magistrates). Williams welcomed Hutchinson and her followers. As he set about establishing Providence, she and her followers paid the Narragansetts for the use of land on a nearby island in the bay, known to the Indians as Aquidneck and to